Lay a fire that catches first time.
Build it upside down. Big splits on the bottom, kindling on the top, one match at the very top. It lights first time, it smokes less, and it does not need somebody kneeling in front of it with a poker for an hour.
- How long
- Ten minutes to lay. Hours to burn.
- You need
- A fireplace or fire pit · Dry split wood · Kindling · One match
- Messy
- A bit. Do it on a table.
Step 1. Check the wood is actually dry.
Firewood needs to be under about 20 percent moisture to burn properly. Hardwood split and stacked under cover gets there in roughly twelve months, softwood in about six. Wood cut this autumn will not burn well this Christmas, whatever the person who sold it to you said.
Two tests without a meter. Knock two pieces together: dry wood cracks, wet wood thuds. And look at the end grain, because a dry split has fine cracks running out from the center like the spokes of a wheel.
Step 2. Open the damper, then warm the flue.
Open the damper all the way before anything is lit. A cold chimney holds a plug of cold air that sits there like a lid, and a fire lit underneath it puts its smoke into the room instead of up the flue.
Roll a sheet of newspaper, light one end, and hold it up inside the fireplace opening for twenty or thirty seconds. You will feel the draught turn around and start pulling. Then lay the fire.
Step 3. Biggest splits on the bottom, touching.
Two or three of your largest splits, laid side by side across the grate with only a finger of gap between them. This is the opposite of what most people were taught, and it is the whole trick.
Step 4. A second layer across the first, smaller.
Turn ninety degrees and lay smaller splits across the big ones. Then a third layer across that, smaller again. You are building a low square stack that gets finer as it goes up, like a pyramid with the point cut off.
Step 5. Kindling on top, then the tinder.
A handful of pencil-thick kindling across the top, then your tinder on top of that: a twist of newspaper, birch bark, a wax firelighter. Nothing goes underneath. Nothing is buried.
Step 6. Light the very top and walk away.
One match, at the top. The flame burns downward through the stack at its own pace, and each layer is dried and preheated by the fire directly above it before it has to catch. That is why it works.
Do not poke it. A top-down fire that is left alone will run for hours. A top-down fire that is rearranged after ten minutes becomes an ordinary fire that needs rearranging every ten minutes.
Five things that must never go on it.
- Painted or treated wood. The treatment is the point of the wood and burning it puts it in the air you are sitting in.
- Pallets. Some are heat treated and harmless, some are chemically fumigated, and you cannot tell by looking. The stamp tells you, and if there is no stamp, no.
- Driftwood. Salt in the wood turns into chlorine compounds in the smoke.
- The Christmas tree. Dry conifer with resin in it flares hard and throws burning fragments. Every fire service in the country asks people not to and every year some of them do.
- Any liquid accelerant. If the fire needs petrol, the wood is wet. Fix the wood.
A working smoke alarm and a swept chimney are the two things that make all of this ordinary rather than risky. Chimney fires are caused by creosote, creosote is caused by burning wet wood slowly, and a top-down lay burning dry wood is the cheapest creosote prevention there is.
That is the end of this one
The word for what you just did is top-down lay.
Fire moves upward, so a flame sitting on top of the pile dries and warms every piece below it before that piece is asked to burn. A fire lit from underneath has to heat its fuel and climb through it at the same time, which is why it needs poking and why it smokes.
Where to go now